Pomegranate Surprise

The invitation bore the gracious ease and urbanity of the host, reminding you that your agent was in town and hoping you'd be available for drinks at five to visit and chat. You were already a chum of the host, anticipated the presence of at least one other long-time chum, and even imagined you might just ask for and get something a bit exotic or out of the ordinary for drinks. Of course you responded, with alacrity and celerity, thoughts of Pisco punches or Sazeracs or even a Ramos gin fizz lolling over your tongue.

As you entered, you were handed without being asked a tall, pleasingly frosty glass containing a dark red fluid which you soon divined to be a combination of pomegranate juice, vodka, and a splash of San Pellagrino water. Not bad.

Your agent noticed you from across the room, detached herself from a conversation, and bore in. "We've got work to do. Sometime tomorrow, after six. Pick a coffee shop." A quick calculation led you to readjust watching "Treme" until a rerun later in the week. You picked a spot near where she is staying, confirmed the time, then allowed her to retreat to her conversation.

As time bore on and you were well into your second pomegranate surprise, as you called it, the room filled with individuals, approximately ninety percent of whom you knew from long experience, the remainder were those such as Alan Folsom, whom you'd known from having read. 

The one surprise was the appearance of the actor John Beck, whom you greeted with affection and he you with warmth; you'd not expected him to have known the host, although it appears to you that the host is well traveled and one of those amazing phenomena in American letters, a truly versatile and gifted writer in book, stage play, and screen play who remains largely unknown outside the tent.

Time and pomegranate surprises bore on to the point where a group of you began exchanging reminiscences. It came to you that this was a lovely type of bonding. Your agent, referring to

your host, spoke of having delivered him to a former sales manager of a large paperback house as a million-copy seller, to which the sales manager said expansively, well, if you want to talk about million-copy sales--at which point he nudged you--this one sold us a two-million title he'd actually pulled out of a slush pile. 

 Anyone remember "The Harrad Experiment"? Of course he quickly undercut that with another nudge, recalling the time when you'd worked for a competitor and had presented a project for which you estimated sales of at least a hundred thousand, only to be told, quite archly, here at Dell we like to think in millions. We do not like to acknowledge lesser figures. More stories, more elaborate schemes and speculations, all of which caused you to realize a significant factor to the group ambiance. It was literally afloat with casual good cheer and fellowship; there was none of the tension, competitive edge, nor defensiveness you often feel when the demographic is overrun with wannabes.

Everyone in the room had been at one time a wannabe; you feel comfortable in saying that none of them had settled into a condition of well-fed or, indeed, well-read smugness. Long after the tingle of the pomegranate surprises had abated, you were nevertheless talking about a project in which you'd thought to take on D.H. Lawrence in your plan to write volume two of his "Classic Studies in American Literature," which could surely be taken as some form of hubris, except that the former sales manager squeezed your arm in chiropractic affection. "It has always amazed me that there has been no trace of the kind of thing you're talking about. Even if you fail, you'll have given yourself a gift."

While debating the wisdom of another pomegranate surprise, you actively pushed the work of two wannabes, one a student, the other a client, realizing this, too, was a part of that inside-the-tent ambiance so many wannabes regard with the suspicion that the entire publishing/reading tent is a vast conspiracy--until they are, as Alan Folsom was, and indeed you, and Gayle Lynds were, snatched in.

Just before taking your leave, your agent reminded you, "Tomorrow is a work day, and maybe you should think about coming to my Tuesday night at Borders in Thousand Oaks." One way or another, you reflected, every day is a work day. A gifted client of yours, with one book, a hardcover, from SOHO Press, is having a torturous time getting representation for a worthwhile project. Close to two hundred demurrals from agents. Tomorrow is a work day for him, too. Walking to your car, where Sally awaited you, you realized what you'd just experienced at the gathering was a form of alchemy wherein some of the known rules of the universe had been bent. Somehow, perhaps in just such a gathering, your agent, before she'd become your agent, had heard of you enough times that her curiosity drove her to Google and a search of you.

Sally had been napping when you approached the car. Seeing you, she sniffed for the tell-tale signs of what long experience in such things had taught her, the rumpled cocktail napkin withdrawn from the jacket pocket, the unwrapping, the revelation. Look, Sally, chicken teryiaki. And what's this? Italian salami. And this? Aha, munster cheese. Eat up, old girl. Tomorrow's a work day.

Funny you should ask

Humor is burlesque and parody without props. Although there may be physicality to inform it, humor is comedy without the banana peel or the cream pie. In comedy, character types are sufficient enough conditions; in humor, articulated individuals, preferably pompous ones, are a necessary condition, but when all is said and done, anyone with pretensions will do quite nicely, thank you.

A man slipping on a banana peel is comedic, particularly if the slip comes as a surprise. A man who sees the banana peel, pointedly steps around it, then in doing so stumbles from the curb is an occasion of humor. We laugh at the misfortune of both those who slip, grateful it was not us who was the victim, but our laughter is a degree more intense and deeper when we are laughing at the person who seems the slightest bit self-congratulatory at having avoided the lurking peel, only to stumble a beat or two on down the line.

We laugh because of our awareness that it's a jungle out there, where ever there happens to be. We laugh at the sad awareness that there is no rock bottom, rather there is always potential for a far-better worse than any we could have imagined. Humor demands--and always gets--the last laugh, and were you to persist in graphing out its parabola, you would discover that the joke is always on you.

In its way, humor is as blind as justice: it has no specific issue with any of us, is perfectly neutral in assessing blame. Humor's end is not the vendetta of the last laugh, but instead to remind us that we have been chosen for special notice because we are human. We are the only species of whom this is true. In recognition of this fact, we sometimes try to dress up, costume, or otherwise adorn our pets, particularly but not limited to dogs and cats. When this activity does not produce enough of a desired degree of laughter, we are eventually presented with the sad awareness that in descending order, humor and the pet in question have had the last laugh because, however we rationalize our behavior of costuming or tricking or training or teasing, the pet is only afflicted temporarily. We may have momentarily humiliated Fido or Miss Kitty, but someone or something will remind us of our perfidy of behavior. The pet retains its dignity and we recognize our own inner Iago.

Perhaps the most volatile and damaging weapon of all, humor has the ability to topple individuals, attitudes, institutions, traditions, and behavior patterns. Being yelled at, shouted at, outwitted, or repressed are conditions we are used to experiencing; we can find ways of coping with these, even to the point of rationalizing ways in which we emerged waving the bloody scalp of revenge, but there is little relief from being laughed at as a result of having been caught out in hypocrisy or approaching the moral high ground as though we were Arthur, drawing Excalibur from the stone.

American giants

Big and expansive are adjectival qualities that seem to fit with America and its literature, a number of novels swaggering forth like playground bullies, the moral force and message of the authors straining the society about them as though it were a pair of used denims at a thrift shop.

Gatsby is all over hell and gone, its visions tart, unsympathetic, sometimes bordering on anti-Semetic, but when all is said and done and Nick Caraway has us oars against the current, borne ceaselessly back into the past, it is not so much Nick's romanticism we feel as it is Fitzgerald's own sense of feeling betrayed.

Huck Finn, meant as a boy's adventure by an author just turned fifty,at the two-thirds mark of his life, and wanting boyhood again, could not help himself; he let so much of the artist in him slip free of his wife and friends for a rip-snorting venture that he captured lightning in a bottle and nearly kept it all there until his conscience somehow caught up with him and he tacked that dreadful reemergence of Tom Sawyer into it at the end. Still, there was a sassiness about him when he lit out for the territory ahead, and his accounts of the Grangeford-Shepherdson feud and his fun with European nobility, and the way he was willing to risk going to hell for his realization that neither the runaway slave, Jim, nor any person should be reduced to a state of mere chattel. There were all these moments to counterbalance the weights sewn into his cuffs by his conscience and the society he tried so hard to please.

There was the absolute perfection of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, standing so proud and illustrative of the small lives of small persons that it radiated outward in stature. Like Twain, he, too, should have remained west, where his instrument was forged, whence he came and brought with him the voices and sensitivities of his origins.

These are merely three: Willa Cather, Jack London, Ring Lardner, and for all he wrote clunkily, Theodore Dreiser, not to forget Grace Paley, all of them grabbing large hunks and moulding them into persons who sounded and yearned like us. They had in common the ability to find the giant amid the undistinguished, making large of the small, igniting a force that lit up and warmed the imagination of those who followed and read.

Illusions

How is it that you remind so many individuals--including complete strangers--of someone else? Last week, as you awaited a student in a coffee shop, a man approached you. You're probably used to hearing this, he said, but you're a dead ringer for that actor, what's his name? There is a long pause wherein you realize he has momentarily forgotten the name of the actor you remind him of and because he has momentarily blocked on the name, now expects you to know immediately who it is you should be reminding him of. Any hesitation on your part would speak to your dereliction. The sobering (for you) fact is that you have been mistaken for a variety of actors, not so much because of your physical configurations as due to your expansive tendencies in gestures. Your accuser/approacher is moments away from being embarrassed for not being able to complete the equation he initiated. You know, he says. What's his name? Sorry, you say. Ah, he says. Ah. Got it. Whitmore. James Whitmore. Flattering, you say. Very flattering, but he seemed so much more nuanced. The best you can do is assure the man that you and the late actor had a vague resemblance factor in eyebrows. The man shakes his head. Dead ringer, he says, showing no sign of leaving. You begin wishing the student would show up, which would allow you to ask her in the man's presence the name of her father-in-law. Her answer closely embodies one of your theories about human connections, associations, and relationships. Her answer would somehow convince the man you and she were making fun of him, conspiring against him as indeed authors do from time to time when they share information a particular character does not know.

Mercifully for the man who is positive you are a dead ringer for the late actor, James Whitmore, he leaves before your student arrives. When she does appear, you ask her, Do you see any resemblance between me and your father-in-law? From her response, it is made clear to you that the possibility never crossed her mind. Grandpa Jimmy? she says. You? How interesting. Her diplomacy is impeccable. She has graciously avoided saying yes when she had no thought to do so nor no, when doing so might have seemed somehow indecorous or judgmental.

Days later, you are leaving your favorite venue for coffee and a woman radiant in middle-aged coif and stature takes your arm and smiles. I just had to tell you, she says, how much you remind me of my father. She turns to the man sitting next to her, likely her husband, with whom she'd noted the similarity. Doesn't he? she says. The man nods. The woman's eyes mist. I just lost him this year, she says. I still look for him. The misting is more profound. You say, Thank you. I'm please to remind you of someone you care for. Her hand squeezes my arm, then let's go; she has reached the point of being embarrassed for speaking of grief to a stranger. You thank her and move on, touched, a parade of events moving before you like suspects in a police line-up, incidents of seeing missing friends and family in the gestures and faces of strangers.

We move through our daily routine as ourselves and reminders of others of varying possible identity to others. From time to time, when you are shaving, you see your father smiling at you, you see traces of your mother's father, that remarkable, relatively short man whom you rarely had the vision to see as he was before the synapses and brain chemistry began removing him from recognition. At your father's funeral, a longtime friend of your sister saw you and gripped her husband's arm. He's just like Jack, she said, and the knowledge that you reminded someone of your father was such a relief that you felt like dancing. In the same, favored coffee shop, you occasionally see your mother until she turns at some angle where it becomes apparent that the similarity has departed like a willful parrot fleeing its cage. You do not always look like you to yourself, sometimes haunted, pestered, abstracted. Sometimes you say or do things you had not anticipated saying or doing

At a writers' conference last year, you were approached by a man who wanted to shake your hand for the pleasures afforded him from reading your work. You thanked him profusely, even when he said how deeply disappointed he was that you saw fit to kill off Jacques in your last book. You have no idea who he had mistaken you for; you have never had a character named Jacques much less have you killed off such a character.

As a writer and an editor and a teacher, you manipulate reality,in large measure through the effective tool of illusion. It is only fair that in someone else's reality, you become illusion from time to time. It is a mystery that you often remind others of others, but it is a gift all the same.

Pancakes

At the time when your most gainful means of employment was delivering the Los Angeles Examiner to a route extending just north of the Wilshire Boulevard Miracle Mile, one of your perks was a monthly pancake breakfast, hosted by the portly, mustached district manager, known to you as Mr. Raskin.

For someone your age, before girls became a factor to be associated with romance, a pancake breakfast was an occasion if not the occasion of romance tinctured with adventure, trumping in its culinary way the Saturday afternoon double-feature-plus-serial-plus cartoon matinee at the Ritz Theater where, even were the double features a dud, there was in mitigation an enormous banister on which to slide, extending from the mezzanine to the ground floor, splendid in its shiny mahogany luxury.

The pancake breakfast was an opportunity to out-eat your peer cadre of Examiner delivery boys, earning the opportunity to sit at the table with Mr. Raskin, who always wore a tie, then later to assist him with handing out such prizes as discount tickets to the Bimini Baths at Third and Vermont, or miniature golf at the course between the Pan Pacific auditorium and the Gilmore Gasoline Self-Serve on Beverly, or possibly a few point of ice cream at any Thrifty Drug.

Part of the romance of the pancake breakfasts was the venue, The Log Cabin, which among other things was the LA version of White Castle and the ten-cent hamburger. Long before International House of Pancakes was a batter blob on the chef's jacket, The Log Cabin featured a stirring menu of pancakes and waffles, including one offering of "our famous buttermilk griddle cakes that doesn't quit until you do."

Your mother was properly suspicious of these restaurants, primarily since the finished product was quite a bit larger than hers and was reputed to contain the most suspicious element known to mankind, Crisco. The Log Cabin also presented its syrup in a log-cabin-shaped tin, unlike the pristine dispensers at Du-Pars or indeed the home-use favorite, Vermont Maid, which came in an oval-shaped bottle featuring on its label a woman who was your first crush before you began to recognize the concept of crushes. She had long, amber hair, a noble visage that somewhat reminded you of Prince Valiant's wife. To show the absolute fickleness of your pre-puberty ethos, you were willing to throw her over for Log Cabin syrup.

Your mother was, you recognized early on, a superb cook, her weaknesses limited to coffee, which she insisted in boiling, then reheating just to make sure, and all things related to pie and pastry. You were by no means cheated; her cakes, cobblers,fruitcakes, floating islands, pandowdy, strusel, peche Melba, angel charlotte russe, and puddings of all sorts were only the tip of the culinary iceberg; her goulash, pasta, roast, fish, and a particular flair for the chop and the skirt steak left little to be desired, nor was she remiss in the lunches she prepared during your early years, as though to make sure that when the university cafeteria beckoned, you would remember whence you came. Just as you once crafted a short story about a man whose acquaintances were interested in him because of his dog, you had friends of each gender who, you realized, were more drawn to your mother's table than your conversation.

It is difficult to think of pancakes without thinking of the Log Cabin or of the syrup for the pancakes without thinking of that cabin-shaped tin.

Much of this reflection is a historical landslide that was dislodged by a friend extending you the wish that a current book project sell like hot cakes, a metaphor that invariably captures your fancy by wondering how hot cakes sell, then leading you over the falls of history and your own past with thoughts of your own experiences with hot cakes and such delightful side trips as latkes, sopapillas, beignets, and not to forget hush puppies.

Words, words, words.

Between is a good word for a writer, representing as it does even the trope "between projects," a hovering state of exposure to attractions nagging for attention or the even more hovering ambiguity of inattention.

Attraction is another choice word, thanks to its inherent recognition that a writer is drawn by forces of ideas, sexuality, mystery, surprise.

Of course surprise is a bonus word for a writer due to its tendency to push the momentum toward connections and discoveries not otherwise made.

Almost too obvious to be allowed to remain in the line, discovery is the secret reason, the unspoken reason why so many writers write. The usual pose for the writer to take is the one of steadfast proclamation, I write for an audience. This may be true after a lengthy, circuitous route, but the most compelling reason, the reason that actually brings addiction into the equation, is that the writer writes for personal discovery.

Addiction is a problematic word for any list of good words for writers, referencing the writer's public persona image of writing because it has become addictive. If anything, not writing is addictive; writing is either fun or a relief, fun because it is such a blatant opportunity to get even with a universe that seems to tend toward ignoring the writer; it is a relief because of the way it came on, almost unbidden, at a time when other alternatives seemed so unprofitable and dire.

One of the best four-letter words, dire compresses urgency, awfulness, and excessive, negative prognosis with greater dispatch than a mechanical claw at a junk yard, wrapping its components about a junked-out Mercedes. Dire need and dire consequences don't seem to clutter a page with the operatic yodel so common in overwritten material. Dire is so powerful, it could have been coined by Puccini, which would have made it even more wonderful than it already is. It is literally fraught with meaning.

Ah, fraught, you say. From our middle English friends, to fraughten or lade a ship or conveyance such as a narrative. How much will it bear?

Up to you.

Loss

During the life you have lived this far, you have lost enough people and things to know that there is no way to cope with grief, much less any way to go about avoiding the effects it will have on you. Given your experience to date in dealing with what you have left before you while attending to the things you wish to accomplish and experience, the reminders of what has been lost could overwhelm your enthusiasm for the present and your strategy for the future. Thus you are left vulnerable, a not uncommon place to be nor one where you are by any account alone.

You are used to the shelf life of persons, animal friends, and things are running on time lines, causing you to accept intellectually the notion of lifespan, but even in such cases, the heart has its own ways of dealing with what the intellect knows, transcending time, space, and causality.

You are less likely these days to be on the Hollywood Freeway, but whether you are traveling in that area alone or with others, when you pass the Woodman-Avenue turnoff, your thoughts and an occasional comment are drawn to Sam, the cat who visited you and stayed with you as your writing career grew, then, because you were home most days, opted to be your cat, who is buried on the hillside area adjacent the swimming pool that once belonged to George and Patsy Bishop, who invited you to inter Sam there, not far from their own friend, Black, as a gesture of solidarity and connectivity among human friends that developed as you became first George's editor, then friend.

Sometimes, when you are in Santa Monica, you will drive past the house your parents brought you to after you were born, and only the other day, in a writing workshop, when a student read a portion of her novel, set in Santa Monica at a particular locale, you were able to instruct her to have her character walk across the street to 516 Santa Monica, which you know is now a Chinese restaurant, but which was not always so because it was a remarkable place in which your father attempted for so many years various means of making a livelihood, not the least of which was inviting speculation on the outcome of various contests of speed among thoroughbred horses, but was also given over to the refurbishment and resale of luggage and trunks owned by some of the first-generation greats of the film industry.

Sometimes, when you see pictures of yourself at earlier ages, you blink at the preponderance of hair, curly, abundant, expansive in its cowlick abandon. On other occasions, seeing a runner plying one of your former routes, you are transported to the sixty-to-seventy-mile weeks of your own with your then dog companion, Molly. The male pattern hair hair loss is of little grief; you are fairly comfortable with the you of today, but thanks to the titanium replacements for the hips you were issued at birth, the best you could hope for would be half-hours on the treadmill at the Y, half-hours better spent in the pool.

As though it were a lathe, grief has in its way turned and formed your life, allowing you some voice in shaping outcomes and choices made after some loss, reminding you at all costs to cherish the immediacy about you and the manners in which you embrace it and those about you.

One of the great things a close and dear friend once said about you as he drive you to one of your destiny points of having your first hip-replacement surgery. "Because I've had the operation on my knee, I can appreciate how you'll come out of this, absolutely pain free. But

I'll always remember the way you walk now, as though you were trying to navigate through a pack of friendly dogs without stepping on one."